Found Money (26 page)

A firm knock on the door landed just after dawn. Sarah lay on her side in the fetal position, trying to relieve the stabbing back pain that came with her pregnancy. Her bleary eyes focused on the orange liquid crystals on the alarm clock beside her bed. 6:22
A.M
. She rolled out of bed, slipped on her robe, and started downstairs.

The night had taken its toll. She had slept little, wept often. The tears were not those typical of grief. They were laden with self-pity and apprehension about her future. She thought about the long term, but it was the short term that created the most anxiety. Her mother had run interference for her last night, telling the police that Sarah was an emotional wreck and couldn’t talk to them. Very soon, however, she would have to talk to the homicide detectives. They’d surely ask her if she was aware of any reason why someone might want to kill her husband. One question had kept her awake most of the night: What would she tell them about her father’s money?

The knocking continued.

“Coming,” she said, shuffling to the front door. She instantly regretted having said a word. It took away the option to peek out the window, see who it was, and pretend not to be home. She pulled back the curtain for a discreet peek anyway.

The man standing on the porch was facing the driveway, his back to the house. His profile was unfamiliar to her. He seemed handsome and was dressed casually but smartly. The wristwatch looked to be the expensive kind. Inasmuch as she didn’t feel ready to talk to police, she was certain that no one at the sheriff’s department could afford a Rolex. She unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door.

“Mrs. Langford,” he said in a soft, sympathetic tone. “I’m Phil Jackson.”

She knew the name but was unsure of her feelings. “You’re Liz’s lawyer.”

“That’s right. I’m very sorry about your husband. I know this is a very difficult time for you, but it’s very important that we talk.”

“What about?”

“May I come in, please?”

“No.”

He took a half-step back. “Mrs. Langford, I can understand how you might have some unresolved feelings about me. But the sooner you recognize I’m on your side, the sooner we can get to the bottom of what happened to Brent.”

“I know what happened to Brent. He got himself in the middle of something he should never have gotten involved in. And he got himself killed.”

“But he did it for you. And your baby.”

“I doubt that.”

“It’s true. After Brent testified in court yesterday morning, he and I had a nice talk. One of the last things he said to me was that he knew he hadn’t been a very good husband to you over the years. He always thought you deserved better.”

Her eyes clouded with emotion. She was suddenly less defensive. “He really said that?”

“Yes, he most certainly did. He knew he hadn’t provided for you. He regretted that, terribly. His testimony in court yesterday was his way of making it up to you.”

“It sounded to me like he was just trying to hurt Ryan.”

“No. The goal wasn’t to hurt Ryan. The goal was to protect
you
.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Let me be up front with you. I know all about the three million dollars in the Banco del Istmo in Panama City. A law enforcement source verified that for me. Brent knew about it, too, obviously. His biggest fear was that Ryan—Mr. Goody Two-shoes—was going to screw things up and lose the money for the whole family.”

“That’s always been my fear, too.”

“It’s a reasonable fear. Your needs are different than your brother’s. He’s a doctor who can make a ton of money on his own, if he so chooses. But just like you, Liz needs and deserves the money. So when Brent came forward to help Liz, he was really looking out for you. By the same token, whatever I do for Liz also helps you.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What can
you
do for me?”

“I can help you make sure that Brent didn’t die in vain.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means I intend to honor the agreement Brent and I reached. So long as his widow will help me reach the same objectives.”

“I need specifics.”

“Very simple,” said Jackson. “There’s three million dollars in the bank. According to Brent, you and Ryan were going to divide it fifty-fifty. Liz was supposed to get nothing.”

Sarah blinked. The way he said it made it sound like they really were cheating Liz.

Jackson continued, “So here’s the deal. You keep your share of the inheritance. And as an added incentive to make sure Liz gets her fair share, you get twenty percent of whatever you help Liz take from Ryan.”

“Mr. Jackson, this is my brother we’re talking about.”

He stepped closer, pointing out the purple bruises beneath his facial makeup. “Your brother hired someone to beat the crap out of me. And he may have gotten your husband killed.”

“We can’t be sure of that.”

“We don’t have to be sure. I’m not trying to put him in jail, and I’m not asking you to go that far, either. All we have to do is make the judge in the divorce case think Ryan could possibly have been connected to either act of violence. If the judge so much as
suspects
that’s true, we all come out winners.”

“I don’t know,” she said, wincing.

“Okay,” said Jackson. “You get
thirty
percent of whatever Liz takes from Ryan. After my fee is paid, of course.”

Sarah felt a rush of adrenaline. After years of abuse from Brent, the very act of negotiating gave her a sense of efficacy she’d never felt before. The best part was, Jackson still didn’t even seem to know about the other two million in the attic. Brent must not have told him.

“Tell you what,” she said coyly. “I will definitely think about it.” She stepped back and started to close the door.

Jackson stopped her. “When can I expect to hear from you?”

“When I’m good and ready,” she replied, then swung the door shut.

A deputy from the Prowers County Sheriff’s Department was at the Duffy homestead well before breakfast. On Norm’s advice—insistence, really—Ryan had called to report the break-in. The deputy was a high school classmate of Ryan’s, dressed in the familiar light green summer uniform with short sleeves. Ryan spoke to him alone, keeping his mother out of it as the two men walked around back to the kitchen door. The broken glass pane had the markings of typical Prowers County criminal mischief, according to the deputy. Juvenile crimes consumed three-quarters of his time.

Ryan offered no opinions as to the age of the perpetrator. The trick was simply to report the break-in without digressing into the murder, the money, or the blackmail.

“Was anything taken from the house?” asked the deputy.

“I don’t know for sure,” said Ryan. It was the truth. He had yet to check his father’s dresser drawer to confirm that the gun had actually been taken.

“When did you first notice the broken glass?”

“This morning.” Again, the truth. It had been after midnight by the time he had gone to Josh Colburn’s office, phoned Amy, and returned home to inspect the window.

The report was finished in just a few minutes. Out of sympathy for the family tragedy—meaning Brent—the deputy didn’t detain Ryan any longer than necessary. Ryan thanked him and watched him pull out of the driveway, shielding his eyes as the squad car disappeared into the low morning sun.

Ryan climbed the front stairs, stopping on the porch. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of an approaching car up the road. A truck, actually. It was coming quickly, splashing through muddy puddles of last night’s rain. A hundred yards away he could see the driver. It was Amy.

She really came
.

He jogged to the end of the driveway to head her off. Having yet to tell his mother anything about Amy, he didn’t want a scene. The truck stopped at the mailbox. Amy rolled down the window. Her expression was guarded, neither friendly nor hostile. Her eyes seemed puffy from the all-night drive.

“Thanks for coming,” said Ryan.

“Please, don’t thank me. Do you have the letter?”

“I locked it in the wall safe over at my clinic. Like I said on the phone, I didn’t want to show it to anyone until you confirmed it was genuine. I haven’t even told my mother about it.”

She pushed the clutch, ready to go. “Let’s head into town, then.”

“You can ride with me, if you want.”

“I’ll follow you.”

He sensed more than a little distrust in her voice. “Okay. Follow me.”

They had never found a suicide note. That had been Amy’s first thought when Ryan had mentioned a letter from her mother. The absence of a note had been one of the precious things she had clung to all these years. It was the cornerstone of her denial that her mother had killed herself. It was what had spurred her to drive down from Boulder all night. As she took the letter from Ryan, it was the cause of the butterflies that stirred in her stomach.

Amy handled it carefully, delicately, as if the parchment were as priceless and fragile as the original Magna Carta. She unfolded it and laid it on the desktop before her. The process felt ceremonial, a sacred connection to her mother’s past. She checked the date. Ryan had been truthful. It was just two weeks before she had died.

Amy read in silence, the eyes leading her down an uncharted path. She struggled to keep her composure. She knew Ryan was studying her from the other side of his desk, though her eyes never met his, never left the pale green stationery that bore her mother’s initials.

She glanced up only once, as if suddenly aware of how stifling it was in the back office of Ryan’s clinic. The air conditioner hadn’t been run in days. The lone window was blocked by a set of floor-to-ceiling
shelves jammed with patient files. The faux wood paneling was the cheap kind typically found in basements. Directly over Amy’s head was a long, bent-arm lamp that belonged over a physician’s examining table, not a desk. It threw more heat than light.

It was the emotional heat, however, that was starting to consume her, rising with each sentence, heightened by each word. Halfway through the letter, tiny beads of perspiration gathered above her lip, making her mouth dry and salty. She read to herself, allowing her mind to put the words to the tune of her mother’s voice. She tried to envision her mother actually saying such things aloud. It was a frustrating exercise. The imagined voice kept changing. Amy reached back in time for the soothing voice she remembered as a very small child, but the anxious tone of her mother’s last days was a constant interruption. It was like listening to a radio with a faulty antenna. At times, the interference was so great she couldn’t even remember what her mother had truly sounded like, happy or sad. Her confusion turned the narrator into someone altogether. She could hear Marilyn, Gram, and even herself. The distractions made her angry. It was misdirected anger, an unfocused rage she had harbored her entire life—the anger of an eight-year-old robbed of her mother.

Her hands were shaking as she neared the bottom of the page. She finally had reached a silent rhythm, reading in her mother’s voice, loud and strong. It was strange, but she finished with one overwhelming impression.

“This can’t be true.”

Ryan looked at her quizzically. “You mean everything in the letter is false? Or do you mean your mother didn’t write it?”

“Both.”

Ryan disagreed. But he tried not to sound disagreeable. “Let’s focus on the authenticity first. Did you bring something with your mother’s handwriting that we can compare to this letter, like we agreed?”

“Yes. But I don’t need to make any comparisons to tell you this letter is bogus.”

“That’s your opinion. I’d like to see for myself.”

“What are you, a handwriting expert?”

“No. But if you’re so sure it’s a phony, then what’s the downside to letting me lay the two side by side and compare?”

Amy clutched her purse. She didn’t feel threatened, but his tone had definitely challenged her. “All right.”

She unzipped her purse and removed an envelope. “This is a letter my mother wrote me when I was seven years old, at camp. As you’ll see, the handwriting is totally different.”

He took the letter a little too eagerly, embarrassed by the grab. He opened it and laid it beside the other letter, the one to his father. He didn’t really focus on what the letter to Amy said. Instead, he was checking the loops in the penmanship, noting the way the she dotted the letter “i” or crossed the letter “t.” He compared individual letters, groups of letters, words, and groups of words. He did all the things Norm had told him a handwriting expert would do. Finally, he looked up.

“I’m no expert, but I would say that these two letters were written by the same person.”

“It’s not even close.”

Ryan backed away in his chair. Her tone was getting hostile. “Look,” he said, trying to appeal to reason. “The penmanship in this letter to my
father is a little shaky, I’ll grant you that. But they look very similar.”

“You think it’s similar because you
want
it to be similar.”

“I’d like to copy this and have an expert tell us one way or the other.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve worked at a law firm long enough to know that people hire experts who will tell them what they want to hear.”

“I’m just after the truth here.”

“You’re out to clear your father’s name.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“What’s
wrong
with that?” she said, raising her voice. “Marilyn Gaslow was my mother’s best friend. Your father raped her. And now, forty-six years later, you expect me to believe that Marilyn made it all up?”

“It’s right there in the letter. According to your mother, my father was convicted of a rape he never committed.”

“That’s why I say the letter’s a fraud. Why would my mother write a letter like that?”

“Because it’s the truth, that’s why.”

“It’s not the truth. If it were, your father would have told the whole world he had been falsely accused. Any normal human being would do everything possible to clear his name.”

“There was no need to clear his name. He was convicted as a juvenile and the record was sealed.”

She smiled sardonically. “How convenient. Marilyn works hard all her life, never so much as a hint of scandal in her life. But the very week of her presidential appointment, out pops a letter
saying that she falsely accused a man of raping her.”

“I can’t account for the timing.”

“Well, I can. It’s a lie. It’s designed to hurt Marilyn. And it’s at the expense of my mother.”

“If it’s a lie, then why did my father send you two hundred thousand dollars?”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“I believe my father sent you that money out of gratitude to your mother. She was Marilyn’s best friend. Marilyn confided in her and told her the rape never happened. Your mother did the right thing and wrote a letter to my dad, telling him just that. It finally gave my father the corroboration he needed to prove himself innocent.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Do you have a better explanation as to why my father would send you that kind of money right before he died?”

Amy glared, but she had no response.

Ryan said, “I didn’t think you did.”

Her voice shook with anger. “All right. I’ll play along with your little fantasy for a minute or two. Let’s say my mother wrote that letter. Let’s say Marilyn Gaslow falsely accused your father. Where in the hell did your father get the two hundred thousand dollars that he sent to me?”

“That’s a fair question,” he said softly. “And I’ll answer it on one condition. I want to make a copy of that letter you brought, so I can have an expert compare the two.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then I guess you’ll never know where the money came from.”

Amy paused. The letter she had brought contained nothing embarrassing or too personal.
There was no guarantee Ryan would tell her the truth, but there was one way to make sure she was getting
something
out of the deal. “I’ll swap you. You can copy the handwriting sample I brought. If I can copy the letter to your father.”

“Deal.” He rose from behind the desk, leading Amy to the copy machine in the next room. He reached for Amy’s letter, but she pulled away.

“Yours first.”

Ryan didn’t argue. He made a quick copy and handed it to Amy. She shoved the duplicate in her purse.

“Now yours,” he said.

She handed it over. Ryan shot the copy, then reached for the duplicate feeding out of the other end. Amy stopped him.

“Not so fast. This isn’t a one-for-one trade. Where did the money come from?”

His throat tightened. It had been hard enough to tell Norm, his friend and lawyer. Amy was altogether different. Maybe it all went back to the spark he’d felt the first time they’d met, but for whatever reason, what she thought of him
mattered.
“I don’t know for sure.”

“Where do you
think
it came from?”

“I think…my father used your mother’s letter to get the money.”

“Used it? What do you mean?”

He removed the copy from the tray. “I’m talking about extortion. That’s where the two hundred thousand dollars came from. And lots more.”

“He extorted Marilyn?”

“Not Marilyn. A very wealthy businessman named Joseph Kozelka.”

Amy stepped back, suddenly eager to leave. “This is getting way too crazy.”

“Just listen to me, please. I know it sounds horrible to say my dad was a blackmailer. But put yourself in his shoes. I think the only reason he became a blackmailer is because he was falsely convicted of rape.”

“Your father was a blackmailer
and
a rapist.”

“That’s not possible. The only way this makes sense is if he
didn’t
commit the rape.”

“You wish.”

“It’s mere logic. Ever since I learned about the rape conviction, I’ve asked myself: How does a man rape a woman and then turn into a blackmailer? Could the rapist extort the victim? No way. Unless the rape never happened—and the alleged rapist could prove the victim had made it all up. Your mother’s letter proves exactly that.”

“The only thing this whole visit proves is that I should have listened to Marilyn Gaslow. You Duffys are despicable people, and I need to stay as far away from you as possible.” She grabbed the photocopy from his hand. “And I’m not going to let you use this to prove your phony point.”

“Amy, wait!” He ran after her as she hurried toward the door, grabbing at the letter in her hand and ripping it in half. She screamed and swung at him. He stopped in his tracks. She looked him straight in the eye, her fist clenching pepper spray for self-defense.

Each watched the other, waiting for the next move. Neither one flinched. For an instant, they seemed taken with the irony. It was their parents, after all, who had predestined their meeting, watching from another world as the children moved from subtle flirtation at the Green Parrot to outright confrontation in Ryan’s office.

Amy said, “Stay away from me. I don’t want
your money. And I don’t need your lies.” She turned and quickly let herself out.

He felt the urge to follow but didn’t. He’d taken his best shot. He should have known there would be no persuading her. At least he had a handwriting sample—half of Debby Parkens’s letter to her daughter. It was surely enough to allow one of Norm’s experts to verify she’d also written the letter to his father.

He laid his torn copy on the table and flattened the creases so that it would run through the fax machine. He scribbled a short message on a cover sheet, punched Norm’s number, and fed the documents into the slot.

Second thoughts gripped him as the machine slowly swallowed the letter. It wasn’t as if the handwriting analysis would be dispositive. Experts could only render opinions. Neither experts nor Amy could confirm for a
fact
that Frank Duffy had been falsely accused of rape. Only one person alive could do that. Her name was Marilyn Gaslow. The next chairwoman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve.

The fax machine beeped, signaling the transmission was completed. Ryan stared at the documents, chilled by his own sudden resolve.

He picked up the phone and dialed once again.